Creative Commons

[Michael Carroll <Carroll@law.villanova.edu>]

Dear all,

     In the past, Ann has been gracious enough to allow me to 
address a year-end pitch to the list, and I hope that is still 
okay.  As one of the Board members of Creative Commons, I am duty 
bound to help find support for the organization, and members of 
this list have been very generous in the past.  We close our 
annual campaign on December 31st.

      In terms of news, Creative Commons licenses remain an 
important part of the open access ecology.  Springer's purchase 
of BioMed Central is an interesting datapoint and PLoS's success 
suggest that business models built around CC licenses are likely 
to remain part of the picture for some time to come.  Other 
interesting developments include the launch of the Science 
Commons Knowledge Base, which is part of a research project to 
test whether Semantic Web technologies applied to open access 
journal articles can empower researchers to find patterns and 
insights they otherwise would miss.  We also have launched 
ccLearn, which is working with the community of Open CourseWare 
projects and others projects providing open educational resources 
to be more self-aware about their copyright licensing choices. 
If this is the kind of work you care to support, please visit 
http://support.creativecommons.org/.

      I recognize that this is a tough year for everyone, of 
course -- CC is no exception -- so your donation would be 
particularly welcome.  (As you can see, we have inaugurated a new 
project called the CC network; the details are on that page. 
Your donation entitles you to membership.)  Basically you pick 
the amount you want to donate and click "Join" under that number 
-- or just put in a number of your own!  All donations gratefully 
accepted.  And depending on the amount, the donation brings all 
kinds of cool things, including an Open ID, your own CC network 
site, a jump drive full of Jonathan Coulton music, a signed 
Lessig book, a cool CC laptop sleeve and so on.

        Thanks so much for this -- and please feel free to pass 
this e-mail on to others who might like to support CC.

Warm regards,

Michael W. Carroll
Visiting Professor of Law
American University, Washington College of Law
Washington, D.C. 20016

Research papers: http://works.bepress.com/michael_carroll/
http://ssrn.com/author=330326
blog: http://www.carrollogos.org/
See also www.creativecommons.org